Tron: Ares Adds Jodie Turner-Smith and Greta Lee
The good news for Tron fans continues this week, as The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim, Star Wars: The Acolyte) and Greta Lee (Past Lives, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) have joined the cast of Tron: Ares. No details about the characters they could be playing have been revealed, though they join the previously announced Jared Leto and Evan Peters. The earliest reports about a third film in the franchise date back to the release of 2010's Tron: Legacy, which was meant to revive the '80s franchise, yet it hasn't been until relatively recently that promising details have been confirmed about the project heading into production. Tron: Ares is set to start shooting in August.
The new film comes from Joachim Rønning, who previously directed Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and co-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. With the announcement of Peters' casting, The Hollywood Reporter teased of the plot, "While the two previous movies were largely set inside the world of computers and programs, the script for Ares, written by Jesse Wigutow and Jack Thorne, is said to focus on the emergence of a sentient program that crosses over into the human world that is not ready for contact. Leto, who has been attached to the project for several years, is to play Ares, the manifestation of the program. It is unclear who Peters would play although the script calls for a soldier in the computer world and an awkward gamer in the human world."
Arguably more than the plots themselves, the previous Tron films are more memorable for the unique visual effects they utilized to bring the stories to life. Writer/director of the original 1982 Tron Steven Lisberger recently recalled how he hoped to serve as a guiding force for the upcoming Ares.
"The Tron team is hard at work," Lisberger shared with The Hollywood Reporter. "They are always hard at work. It's going to happen. My goal with these things in playing the Obi-Wan role is to say the one sentence that has an impact. I try to say something that is useful to them without getting into the weeds."
The debut film had a reported budget of $17 million and went on to earn $50 million worldwide. Tron: Legacy had a reported budget of $170 million and would go on to take in $400 million worldwide, but given that Disney also released Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland that same year, both of which went on to take in more than $1 billion worldwide, Legacy fell far short of expectations.
Stay tuned for details on Tron: Ares.
Are you looking forward to the sequel? Let us know in the comments!